A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Ever since Haswell platform and AMD R9 290X GPUs came out DX11 Unigine was going to be one of the big 3D WR targets for the overclockers at HWBOT.ORG and TeamAU from Australia has been setting the pace helped with some nice overclocking from a few other countries including UK (8pack) and USA (steponz) using GIGABYTE Z87X-OC and Z87X-OC Force as the boards of choice and AMD R9 290X in 3WAY and 4WAY.

The scoreboard lit up big today with a monster score from the team down under pushing the former WR set by Steponz and dinos22 during GIGABYTE booth OC session at CES2014 by a whopping 200 points to fall just shy of the all illusive 9,000 points.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Some news from HWBOT.ORG just in with HiCookie taking out the single card Unigine Heaven world record using the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC and R9 290X GPU.

Just so you know, the following keys are fading away on my keyboard: R, E, C, O, and D. Why? Because there are so many Orceds to write about. Just now, Hicookie from Gigabyte has submitted the WR for 1xGPU Heaven DX11. He clocked the Radeon R9 290X to 1355/1725 MHz and beat Sofos1990 by almost 40 points. He was struggling with the efficiency for a very long time. In fact, that's what prevented him from taking the record at the CES'14 overclocking event.

The record is set with an interesting combination of hardware too. At least, interesting for the companies supporting the development of HWBOT. Hicookie used an Intel CPU, GIGABYTE motherboard and graphics card, an SSD and memory from G.SKILL and an Enermax power supply. Cool! But of course all records are created equally and we congratulated 8 Pack when breaking records on non-partner hardware as much as we congratulate Hicookie today! ;-).

Friday, January 17, 2014

You may well be aware of that GIGABYTE held an Overclocking contest during CES a few weeks ago, we called it the CES 2014 Extreme OC Event – seemed a good name for it. Anyway, one thing you may not be aware of is that during some pretty grueling and lengthy benching sessions, we saw three world record tumble; Cinebench 11.5, Uningine Heaven and 3DMark06. Check out the details below.

After much discussion and deliberation here at GIGABYTE HQ in Taipei, we selected the above photo submission from Charles Terell from Virginia, US. Charles’ photo ticked all the boxes as far as I’m concerned – a clearly Funk-inspired scene with Charles himself in an alien spaceship sporting crazy silver high-heeled boots holding two GIGABYTE boards. The caption ‘Supergroovalistic GigabyteMotherboardication’ tops it off very nicely. Good work Charles!

Friday, January 10, 2014

If you’ve never heard of this guy, JayTwoCents is a technology videoblogger that likes to take a more humorous angle on the gadgets, devices and technologies that he covers. In the video below, Jay talks to our man Colin about our new addition to the BRIX family, the BRIX Pro, as well as an overview of the series as a whole.

Gordon from Maximum PC shot a bunch of videos earlier this week while taking a tour of the GIGABYTE suite at Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas earlier this week. Gordon takes a hands on look at our recently launched BRIX Pro, a super compact PC kit that features Intel’s latest i7-4770R processor, most notable for its Iris Graphics 5200. Check out the video below to see the BRIX Pro being put through its places playing Battlefield 4… pretty decent no?

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

As the GIGABYTE Retro OC contest draws closer to its conclusion next week, we thought we’d have a fun competition for all of our Facebook fans. The idea is pretty simple, just go to the photo contest button on our main page, upload a photo of yourself looking as ridiculously retro as possible holding a GIGABYTE motherboard and you’ll have a chance to win one of our flagship Z87 series motherboards, the recently launched GIGABYTE Z87X-UD7 TH.

The eventual winner will be chosen by us at our discretion. The criteria? Simple… more retro is more better!

Just to spice things up a little, we’re also allowing (even blatant) Photoshopped images, so by all means, get creative!

Just as CES 2014 was kicking off, GIGABYTE invited the world’s top Overclockers to the CES Extreme OC event at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas. Co-sponsors Intel, GSKILL and Enermax were also in attendance making sure that the Nevada desert got a taste of truly extreme Overclocking, while team GIGABYTE we’re leading a world class OC contingent with Dinos22 and Hicookie running the show.

Friday, January 3, 2014

HWBOT held another crazy Country Cup tournament or “World Cup of overclocking” as they refer to it and it was something else this year. The competition was by far the largest one ever run with more countries and result submissions than any other comp in the past.

In the end overclockers from Australia triumphed with an emphatic last 4 stage wins but it was not all smooth sailing for the team down under! Germany, France, Indonesia and USA made sure it all went down to the wire and no doubt will set precedent for another huge clash in 2014.

Let’s talk about this competition a little for those of you who were not aware there was “an overclocking World Cup” on and how you could get involved this year.

First of all for any of you unfamiliar with the biggest and best known overclocking competition website in the world, make sure you visit HWBOT.ORG. For overclockers, this is a familiar website but perhaps for non-overclockers you may remember the recent articles on ban of Windows 8 for competitive purposes which was largely the result of the HWBOT admin team finding some loopholes in the latest Microsoft OS which have since been patched in most cases. Yes, that’s right, this is the gathering place of some of the world’s biggest and best geeks AND nerds who share a passion for overclocking. It’s become a big community in the last 10 years so definitely something to check out in your free time!

The competition itself comprised of 8 stages with a significant amount of restrictions per stage and requirements for multiple entries over different generations of hardware to be submitted requiring a large group of overclockers to put results in to be able to compete and that’s what makes it a country cup rather than a team cup or an individual effort. It takes a dedicated group of overclockers with a large spread of hardware to be able to compete.

There were stages where some teams did not have enough results and dropped significantly down the rankings including the winning team from Australia who, for example, fell short in stage 5 and dropped severely down rankings. USA was also in the same position in that stage. The most important aspect is to complete all stages to be eligible to receive rankings and points in stages and by missing one part of the score you automatically drop below all the teams who submitted full results for the stage.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that you have to be a professional or semi pro overclocker to compete. Like I said before, there were simply stages where ANY result would have been better than no result and would have significantly helped teams to climb up the rankings. The hardware also was nowhere near the top range. The only stage where really expensive hardware was required was probably in Stage 1 (which was 3DMARK11 Performance which most people ran with X79 motherboard, 4960X CPU and 4x 290X GPUs). There were some stages where only a measly PCI graphics card was needed to compete on which would not have set people more than $20-30. There was also plenty of choice on different platforms to focus including some AMD platform stages and APU benchmarks which were certainly not expensive but were a lot of fun. The benchmark for that stage was Catzilla and to me it was a really interesting stage despite my team doing pretty badly there overall.

The Cup also had some generous prizes from all the sponsors of the competition. GIGABYTE provided its flagship overclocking motherboard, the Z87X-OC, for all three stages. Distributing these prizes among team mates will no doubt prove another complicated affair considering just how many people contributed to results for all the countries but most guys enter these competitions for the sake of competing and beating their fellow OCers’ scores rather than entering to win prizes. The sponsors were all very generous with prizes which is good to see and these guys should be rewarded for the effort they put in .

GIGABYTE is one of the proud sponsor of this competition and we loved seeing the competitive spirits rise to the surface where some of the best of the best overclockers competed for their countries to raise the Country Cup and waive their flags proud. We want to extend our congratulations to all who participated and the top 3 teams who walked away with top honours, Australia, Germany and Indonesia. Well done!